The Church Impotent - book review

 

The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity by Leon J. Podles
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The church is overly feminine in character and piety today. Cultural feeling is that the church is more for women, and that a “man’s man” wouldn’t go. The church sings songs that are largely feminine, where exuding emotional expression is essential to feeling pious. Christians need to recover a healthy view of masculine Christianity and not inadvertently suppress it.

This is Leon Podles’ thesis, with which I generally agree. But I am concerned with some underlying assumptions he makes, which I’ll address here. Podles overreacts to a genuine problem in the church.

Culture today sees male and female on a fluid spectrum. You might feel and identify as female today and male tomorrow. Too many conservatives today overreact, insisting there is a hard line between the two. A man should never act stereotypically female: as a receiver, a submitter. If he does, he is acting against nature and emasculating himself.

Better to see the two sexes as two good ways to live out our piety. Occasionally the lines cross, but we should revert to our lane when needed. Yes, a man should consider himself part of the bride of Christ, and submit to Him, as a wife is called to do to her husband (Eph 5:22). But he should also imitate Christ in manly initiative, going forth into the world to actively do His Father’s will. We need more of the latter today, but that doesn’t make the former wrong. Both can be distorted and overused. Female piety can be distorted, as Podles documents happened in the middle ages, and is happening again today. But I’ve seen plenty of distortion of male piety in reaction against that these days, too.

Examples:
If a husband heeds his wife’s wisdom, he has been emasculated.
If a woman wants a career outside the home that doesn’t interfere with her domestic duties, she is stepping out of bounds.
A husband being a servant leader is just code for abdicating his real leadership.
A single young woman seeking to marry should have no aspirations outside the home, or she is a feminist.

All of this comes from overly bifurcating sex roles. There are plenty of times the man needs to be tender and caring, and the woman needs to be tough and courageous. I would have voted for Margaret Thatcher. One cannot assign specific virtues to separate gender boxes. The fruit of the Spirit are not gender-specific. The Bible gives us examples of this in the courageous initiative of Abigail (1 Sam. 25) and Ruth, of David’s Psalms (awful lot of feminine-sounding love talk in there), and others.

Here are some examples of Podles overly bifurcating the sexes:
“Masculinity involves nurturing, but a nurturing achieved in a willingness to suffer and die.” (195)
What? This is meant in contrast to the feminine. Is a mother not willing to suffer and die for her child in bearing and raising him?

“Men disclose themselves through their actions, women through their words.”
What? Tell that to David and Solomon, who wrote the Psalms and Song of Solomon.
Tell that to every wife who wants (legitimately) to hear more words of affection from their husbands.
Yes, a man’s actions mean more to him than his words, but a woman’s actions in the home are as equally as definitive for her as a man’s outside the home. The stereotype is unhelpful.

Finally, “the body of Christ in the Eucharist was the object of women’s devotion” (200).
Podles seems to take this as a criticism, when it should be true for both sexes. He says Christ becomes a feminine figure in feeding His church, in communion, and thus criticizes not feminism, but the very pattern God gave us in the sacrament. This gets a little crass, but I believe the metaphor is biblically sound: Podles rejects the idea as overly feminized, that Jesus unites with His church as a man inserts his seed in a woman, causing pleasure and communion. Medieval theologians may have run too far with this metaphor, but it is valid in that Jesus does this so as to make her fruitful (John 15:1-6).

Purgatory. Podles claims this doctrine is uniquely feminine, as women more than men, “seek to aid others even beyond the barrier of death and also causes them to be reluctant to admit that any are lost” (206). This does not seem to me uniquely feminine and Podles gives no rationale for it.

Self-flagellation. Podles cites positively the public practice of self-flagellation by men as a helpful rejoinder to the feminization of the medieval church (233-236). This is the epitome of overreaction in Podles’ Catholicism: seeing such unhelpful piety as a constructive corrective to the feminization of the church.

The last chapter is the best:
The critique: “A man can be holy, or he can be masculine, but he cannot be both” (326).
The answer: “holiness is not the negation, but the fulfillment of masculinity” (326).

Podles has mostly helpful things to say, and I recommend the book, but the reader should be warned against some Roman Catholic distortions and overly rigid gender assumptions.

3 stars, out of 5.

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